Off Script

by Graham Hurley

  I tell Geraghty about Moonie taking the train back to Exmouth. My son, I explain, was lying in wait at the station but Moonie never showed. Geraghty needs no prompting. She understands at once. Requests for CCTV footage are apparently routed through force headquarters. She’ll have it in hand within minutes.

  ‘You’ve got the time of the train?’

  ‘I have.’

  Another note. I can sense she’s impressed. We seem to have stepped out of whatever relationship we had before and she’s studying me with what I can only describe as interest.

  ‘Weren’t you in a movie once?’ she says. ‘With Liam Neeson?’

  ‘I was.’ I return her smile. ‘And it ended very badly.’

  Minutes later, she’s escorting me back to the front door. She wants to know whether I’ve convinced Carrie to pick up the phone and give her a ring and when I tell her I haven’t even asked, Geraghty looks briefly perplexed.

  ‘Why on earth not?’ she asks.

  ‘I made Carrie a promise I’d talk to no one. She seems sure I’ll keep my word. That’s important to me.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’ Geraghty pats me on the arm, an almost motherly gesture. ‘Good luck with that.’

  ELEVEN

  Deko has asked me to meet him at a pub called The Beach. From there, he says, we’ll make our way to the restaurant. I’m clueless about eating out in Exmouth and have no idea what to expect. I’m half-minded to consult Carrie but decide that this latest development in my private life is best kept to myself. I don’t even tell Malo about tonight’s adventure. When he asks where I’m going, I tell him I’m off to the cinema for one of those live feed evenings. Measure for Measure from the RSC? My son would pay good money to avoid it.

  What to wear for my date is an interesting dilemma. I’m being hosted by a man who spends his working days in hand-to-hand combat with a semi-derelict building. I’d love him to turn up the way he was dressed in the pub, especially the leather jacket. That’s the man who took my eye and it’s pointless dressing up for anyone else. And so I walk into The Beach in a pair of olive green culottes and a favourite top which shows more of what my mum calls my embonpoint than might be wise.

  Hesitating by the door, I spot Deko at once. He’s standing at the bar, deep in conversation with an overweight woman in a Hawaiian shirt probably visible from the moon. She can see me at the door and she touches Deko on the arm. He shoots me a nod, kisses the woman lightly on the cheek, and collects a pile of clothing from a nearby stool. That leather jacket again. Wonderful.

  We step outside and he hands me a heavily padded yellow anorak and suggests I try it on for size.

  ‘Are we expecting rain?’ There isn’t a cloud in the sky.

  He smiles but doesn’t answer. It’s a minute’s walk to the marina basin. Access to the pontoons is via a locked gate protected by a keypad. He taps in a number and the gate swings open. Gazing briefly down at the neat lines of moored boats, I begin to get the picture. Not a restaurant at all but a trip on the water.

  The anorak fits beautifully and I’m still wondering why when we come to a halt beside a sizeable RIB. I count the seats. There are seven.

  ‘This is yours?’

  ‘No. But I have a key.’

  For a big man he moves with the grace of a dancer. He steps off the pontoon and into the RIB, and then turns to extend a hand. Moments later, the boat is moving beneath my feet as he fires up the engine before returning to the pontoon to cast off. The final line is attached to the bow and it’s my job to sort it out when he’s back aboard.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Waiting for you, skipper.’

  I slip the line, coil it at my feet as we reverse neatly out. Deko is standing at the wheel. He nods at the seat beside him and moments later we’re burbling softly seawards. At the dock entrance, the tide is full, not a stir of current, and Deko eases the throttle forward, skirting the dozens of moored yachts we can see from Pavel’s penthouse. To his immense credit, he doesn’t play the Alpha male at the wheel – no punch in the back from a surge of acceleration – but simply lets the RIB pick up speed.

  It seems to find its own way from buoy to buoy. When Deko asks, I admit this is the first time I’ve been out on the Exe and the news seems to please him. We’re heading upriver now, past another line of moored yachts, and he slows to point out one in particular. It looks brand new. It’s broader than the rest and radiates what I can only describe as a sense of purpose.

  ‘State of the art,’ Deko says. We’re moving at walking speed. ‘Total beast. Eats any other yacht alive. Cleans up on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. This RIB belongs to the bloke who owns it.’

  ‘He’s a friend of yours?’

  ‘Yes. Anyone who tells you there isn’t money in fancy hotels is lying.’

  Deko, it turns out, is a member of the local sailing club. They race twice a week and Deko’s friend usually wins. As we pick up speed again, he tallies the moored yachts one by one, not by their owners’ names but how they made their money. Retired solicitor. Financial advisor. Eye surgeon. Big name in rental vans. University don. Commercial pilot. Jobbing stockbroker. Finally, we slow again. Ahead, untroubled by the beginnings of the outgoing tide, is a luminous confection in wood, and rope, and carefully gathered canvas. It has two masts and a sturdiness that would put you in the best of moods ahead of any voyage. But this sturdiness, this sense of self-confidence, is softened by something close to grace. As the light begins to die, its reflection shimmers on the water. Beautiful.

  ‘And this one? Judge? Brain surgeon?’

  ‘Pirate.’ He grins. ‘Me.’

  ‘This is yours?’

  ‘It is. Every nail. Every plank. Every last spoonful of varnish. If you want the full story, it’s called a Breton Thonier. That means it’s a real boat.’

  A Breton Thonier. Somewhere deep in my childhood I’ve seen a boat exactly like this. I’m still trying to remember where when Deko eases the RIB alongside and then asks me to take the bow line and make it fast to a cleat on the deck. I haven’t a clue what any of this stuff means but I get the broad picture. The wooden hull towers above me. Standing on tiptoe, I can just loop our line around the cleat.

  ‘Nicely done.’ Deko is securing another line at the stern. As if by magic, we’re riding alongside a rope ladder with wooden steps. I make my way carefully towards it as Deko shuts down the outboard motor. Then I pause. A wooden plaque is set into the base of the main mast of this fabulous craft and it frames the single word that must be its name: Amen.

  I scale the ladder, glad I settled for wearing a pair of plimsolls, and wait on deck for Deko to join me. At last I’ve remembered where I’ve been on a boat like this before. My mum had an aunt who lived in a fishing port in southern Brittany. Tante Beatrice was very old and always wore black. She had a round face, wet eyes, big red hands, and white whiskers that sprouted from her chin. We were all slightly frightened of her, my mum included, but just occasionally – always in summer – we’d go and stay.

  ‘Douarnenez,’ I announce.

  ‘What?’ Deko is checking my bow line.

  ‘Douarnenez. That’s where I’ve seen boats like these before.’

  ‘You know Brittany?’

  ‘I grew up there. The best part of me is Breton, thanks to my mum.’

  Deko steps towards me. He clearly doesn’t believe a word.

  ‘You were born in Brittany?’

  ‘I was. A long time ago. Never press a lady about dates but it’s true. Perros-Guirec on the north coast. Douarnenez is south, beyond Brest. That’s where boats like this come from.’

  ‘I know. That’s where I bought it. Douarnenez …’ He shakes his head. ‘Amazing.’

  We stand together for a moment.

  ‘Tell me you live aboard.’ I gesture out at the gleaming spaces of the river. ‘Who’d want to wake up to any other view?’

  He doesn’t answer me but produces a key. The long plank deck is flush, a working space, I assume, in the day
s when a boat like this would be out fishing. The clue here is Thonier. Thon means ‘tuna’ in French.

  I follow Deko back towards the stern. The sight of the big, spoked steering wheel unlocks another memory. A couple of years ago, H and Malo organized an Armistice Day expedition to the D-Day beaches to raise funds for injured veterans. They hired an ancient Brixham trawler called Persephone and we took half a dozen paying guests across the Channel. A storm on the passage back nearly killed us all but standing here, feeling the slow stir of the river beneath my feet, moments from that expedition come flooding back.

  Deko wants me to take a look below. Wooden steps lead down from the deck.

  ‘Help yourself,’ he says. ‘See what you think.’

  There’s an element of pride in the invitation, impossible to miss. The steps lead down to a space I recognize as the doghouse, a working space full of charts and navigational gear, then – after yet more steps – a saloon. Everything is familiar from Persephone, but everything is on a smaller scale. Instead of the big circular table that sat more than a dozen of us, there’s a neat rectangle of what looks like polished oak with seats for six. Instead of a sizeable galley, a more intimate space. I’m still staring at the table when Deko joins me. It’s set for two places. A tall vase offers an explosion of purple lilies. Beside it, an uncorked bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Judging by the cutlery, I should be expecting a three-course dinner, and the entrée has already been plated: fish fillets in a nest of onion rings garnished with fresh coriander and thinly sliced tomato.

  ‘You like herring?’

  ‘I love herring.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that.’

  ‘You did all this?’

  ‘Chrissy. A friend of mine. You might have seen her in the pub. She was out here this afternoon. Everything we’ll eat is down to her.’

  I settle at the table while Deko uncorks a bottle of white wine from a fridge in the galley. Framed black and white prints show this glorious boat earning her living.

  ‘Why Amen?’

  ‘It’s Breton. It means “the rock”. Ar men. I thought you’d know that.’

  I nod. Of course, I think. The Ar Men lighthouse, featured on every Breton calendar ever printed, battered by centuries of wild Atlantic storms.

  ‘You really bought her in Douarnenez?’

  ‘I did. I’d been looking for a while. Buy the wrong boat and you can kiss goodbye to years of your life.’

  ‘A bit like nursing homes?’

  ‘Touché.’ He fills his own glass. ‘The home will be an investment, an earner. This is a love affair.’

  I nod. I say I understand completely. We touch glasses. The wine is ice cold, exactly the way I like it. A crisp Chablis. Promettant, as my mum would say. Deeply promising.

  We start on the herring fillets. The depth of the cure takes me back to the earliest years of my marriage to Berndt, when we’d fly to Stockholm to spend the odd weekend with his parents. They practically lived on herrings, which became a bit of an issue with Berndt, but these are truly special.

  ‘Your friend made the cure?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You’re very clever, Mr Deko.’ I glance up. ‘Tell me about peanuts.’

  ‘You mean my dad? Java? The years out east? All that?’ I nod. It’s a tribute to his intuition that Deko knows exactly what I’m after. ‘It’s the old story,’ he says. ‘The French empire? The Spanish empire? What the Brits got up to before the locals – the Indians and the Africans – chased them out? You must have heard it all before.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘OK.’ He shrugs, forks a curl of herring into his mouth and reaches for his glass. His dad, he says, had been a farmer in Java with a plantation inland from the coast. He’d grown sugar cane to supplement his fields of nutmeg and black pepper and had been experimenting with tobacco in the years immediately after the Japanese occupation.

  ‘He was happy out there?’

  ‘Very. It didn’t make him rich but he loved the people. One of them, a local woman, became a kind of wife. They were together for years and years. In fact, she ended up breaking his heart.’

  Her name, she said, was Raya. When I ask whether they ever had children, Deko shakes his head. He can’t be sure, but he thinks not. Either way, when life after independence became impossible for the ever-shrinking remnants of the Dutch settler community, she refused to accompany him back to Holland. Everything she’d heard about life in Northern Europe – the cold, the wet, the food – told her to stay among her own people. And so, when Deko’s father finally returned to the Netherlands, he found himself alone.

  ‘Money was never a problem,’ Deko says. ‘The problem was Raya. And you know why? Because she was right. Holland was shit. And Dutch women, especially my mother, turned out to be even worse.’

  His father, Deko says, married on the rebound. He met this up-and-coming teacher, good looking, ambitious, full of plans for their joint future, and on the basis of a couple of months together they became husband and wife.

  ‘That was in the late Fifties. They postponed a family because my mum was so ambitious but then I came along and ruined it all. Actually, that’s not fair on me because I think he hated her by then, hated her coldness, and I’m not sure I blame him.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘He went off. Just left us. I was eight at the time and I always assumed he’d gone back out east because when he drank too much that’s all he ever talked about, but later I found out what really happened.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He threw himself under a train. It was winter, at night, in the rain, and I expect he was pissed again. The details don’t really matter but I’m guessing there were good reasons for drawing the line. My mother had to identify his remains but never bothered to tell me.’

  ‘So how did you find out?’

  ‘My father had a brother. He knew.’

  ‘And you were how old? When you found out?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Shit.’

  I extend a hand across the table. Deko ignores it. The past, he says, makes us what we are. He studies me for a long moment, then laughs softly and apologizes for the cliché.

  ‘So, you ran off to sea to get away from your mother?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And it worked?’

  ‘It did.’

  We eat the rest of the fish in silence. You’d never feel sorry for a man like this because he seems so comfortable in his own skin, but sometimes that kind of self-assurance can hide deeper wounds. I’m still wondering whether to probe a little further when he collects our empty plates and heads for the galley.

  The main course is a lamb tagine, a favourite of Chrissy’s. Deko suggests I pour us a glass of Côtes du Rhône while he dishes out. The boat has begun to move beneath us as the tide sluices out.

  ‘I love your hair,’ he says. ‘Do you mind a compliment?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Yes. In a good way.’

  Three courses of chemo took most of my hair away. By now, it’s grown back, a downy blondish fuzz that I keep cropped short.

  ‘I had a tumour. Still have, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Up here.’ I touch my forehead above my right eye. ‘I’m told most of it’s gone and of course I’d like to believe it but …’ I muster a shrug. ‘Nothing’s forever, is it?’

  Deko ignores my question. He wants to know whether I’m still under the consultant, and when I say yes, he wants to know more about the chemo. I tell him the truth. I tell him that nothing in this world prepares you for the experience of lying on a hospital bed in the knowledge that the stuff slowly dripping into your arm is setting out to attack every cell in your body. You feel spiritless. You feel dead. Things that used to have some logic, like words on a page or a script, mean nothing. You can’t concentrate. You can barely think. You’re in limbo. />
  ‘A friend who’d been through exactly the same thing once told me it’s the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake. Except it happens very slowly. It sounds dramatic but, in a way, I have to say she’s right. I never want to go through that again. Ever.’

  ‘And on the brighter side?’

  ‘I’m here.’ I smile. ‘And the tagine is delicious. In fact, everything’s delicious. You’re spoiling me and if you want the truth, I love it.’

  Deko follows the main course with a simple fruit salad, laced with Cointreau. I’ve had more than enough of tumour talk and I press him for more tales from his seafaring days. In particular, I want to know about the impact Exmouth made in those early days.

  ‘It was the scruffiest place. I loved it. We all did. There was barely room enough to con the ship in through the dock entrance, a couple of feet clearance either side. That meant only the little ships, the skinny coasters, could make it. You’d tie up and the dockers would swarm all over you. Sometimes we’d arrive with a cargo of timber, and every last piece was hand-carried off. They had pads on their shoulders, those guys, and in summer it gets hot in the hold. Timber weighs a ton, but they were on piecework and that was their job. We kept everything neat and tidy and in the evening we’d go ashore. The pub where we met this evening – the Beach? That was the centre of everything. The landlord would change money for us, guilders for pounds sterling. The dockers would play three-card brag all night and bet their next day’s wages. Afterwards we’d go back to the ship with some of the locals and party. We had Advocaat, brandy, jenever. Wild times.’

  ‘And?’ I sense a story here.

  ‘I fell in love, of course. A local girl. She was a bit older than me and she lived in a shack on Shelly Beach. She was lovely. She had a little girl, sweet, really cute, and I wanted to be that little girl’s dad. You know how old I was? Seventeen. They’d just started paying me after the fight in Algiers and I blew my first six months’ wages on two diamond ear studs, one for her, one for me. I bought them in Antwerp, cost me a fortune. I was writing to this girl, telling her how great we were going to be together, and it worked fine for a couple of visits, but then we were away for a while, mainly down in the Mediterranean, and by the time I got back to Exmouth, she’d gone.’